Doesn't it reflect more on the quality of the people involved? These tools came out at the same time as a bunch of other AWS tools that are still used. The platform itself, the company around these teams was the same, so why did Code Commit suck but other AWS products from the same vintage turned out great?
You’ve never been part of a large organization have you?
I have a little insight on how things like CodeCommit fall behind the competition.
I worked at AWS in the Professional Services division. For a little over two years I was on a makeshift team maintaining and improving a very popular open source project in its niche.
The project was hosted on “AWS Samples” (https://github.com/aws-samples). Once approved for the initial release of a project in this Github organization, there is no oversite on updates. In my experience from releasing 8 of my own projects to the repository, it takes about two days to get the initial approval and it’s really based on the honor system as far as following the guidelines after that.
We released features and improvements like gangbusters based on customer demand or if we just wanted to scratch an itch.
Everything slowed to a crawl, releases, approval processes, you had to justify everything you wanted to add based on revenue potential, everything had to be approved by higher ups. We were the sane developers. I dropped out of the project then.
But I saw the storm coming, so my last major contribution before it got transitioned was to introduce “hooks” functionality that allowed you to change the processing pipeline by adding a custom lambda arn to it in settings.
Before it became a “solution” former AWS employees who use to work on the project who were still in the industry would make changes and submit pull requests that we would merge.
But back to CodeCommit, can you imagine how hard it is to convince senior leadership to give you funding for a service that neither gives you a competitive advantage nor is a revenue generator?
Hell they just added support for viewing images inline in markdown from the console this year.
Hey fellow nerd. What project was it? I'm just curious if I came across it. I loved digging through the solutions repositories every quarter or so -- always something new and legitimately useful.
When I mean the people involved I didn't mean mostly the software engineers, like you show they probably have the least contribution to the success of these projects. But the point stands that the products have to exist in the same level of bureocracy and disfunctional leadership, so someone must've been better at dealing with that in the successful products. I definitely had really good experiences as a user of several of AWS's things from the same time. Maybe it's more on product leadership but I was just musing about it. To your original question I haven't worked on such big corporations no, max size I've experienced is ~2k people for ~6 months, other than that 10-400 - so I can see how it's also a different beast.
Bezos was well known for focusing on things that “make the beer taste better”. It didn’t give AWS a competitive advantage or any real revenue by trying to host a git repository.
For years they have been making sure that their other services like CodeBuild and CodePipeline work with other hosted git providers.
Uncharacteristically, they even support creating third party git repositories with CloudFormation
As far as working for large companies, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work for a large company/“FAANG” again. I’ve repeatedly ignored overtures from Google (GCP), Microsoft (Azure) and even Oracle (OCP).
